The Order of Books, by Roger Chartier, trans Lydia Cochrane

CITATION: Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1994. Print.


Understanding

• Question: What institutions did Europeans invent to manage the plurality of meanings in print books?
• Answer: authors, and libraries: (1) Material social practices determine the plural and creative readings enacted by communities of readers; (2) Foucault's author-function emerged in the Middle Ages in many types of texts, and declines less rapidly than described in the sciences; (3) The advent of print shifted hopes for an exhaustive library from physical spaces to bibliographies and meta-bibliographies.
• Method: (1) Selections in collections indicate the plurality of audiences and readings available for early print works. (2) A statistical review of Petrarch's corpus shows that authorship, rather than textual identity, more strongly organized manuscript collections. (3) The emergent genre of bibliographies slowly discarded reference to physical spaces.
• Assumptions: (1) Reading practices can be reconstructed unproblematically from textual features in historical texts. (2) A critical convergence (between reader response, new historicism, sociology of texts) on authors necessitates a re-evaluation of Foucault's linkage between the author-function and power. (3) The writing of bibliographies acknowledges the necessary incompleteness of collections. 
• Sententiae: "For both the New Criticism and analytical bibliography, the production of meaning relied on the automatic and impersonal operation of a system of signs -- either the system instituting the language of the text or the one organizing the form of the printed object. Consequently, both approaches refused to consider that the manner in which a work is read, received, and interpreted has any importance for establishing its meaning, and both have proclaimed 'the death of the author' (as Barthes titled his famous essay) and stripped authorial intention of any special pertinence" (26).
  "The New Historicism is more interested in situating the literary work in relation to 'ordinary texts' (of a practical, juridical, political, or religious nature) that constitute the raw materials on which writing operates and that makes its intelligibility possible" (27).

Overstanding

• Assessment: The interaction of bibliography and structuralist readings is more amenable than it seems. The proper integration of historical information and literary readings requires systemic discernment of intra- and extra-textual agents.
• Synthesis: TBA
• Application: Chartier uses collections to point to different audiences, a tactic that flips on its head my efforts with repeated print illustrations. If print illustrations are used in multiple texts for multiple audiences, Chartier would turn the question to the image-textual elements that determine the variety of readings.
  Furthermore, the paradox of bibliography seems to be resolved by the digital archive, whereby the re-inscription of a text is its reproduction.